Tim’s 40!  Can you believe it?  Well believe it cuz for the occasion Chip & Drifty rocked The Lucky Labrador in Portland last weekend.  The three of us flew up to catch the gig and bookended it with a nice visit with my mom and sister.  But back to the gig.  Chip & Drifty packed the house and then blew the roof off the joint with a new arrangement of “Church!”  Excellent stuff.  Happy Birthday Tim!

A little early for both of our birthdays, we went to a place in Brea called “La Vie en Rose” which means “Life In Pink” in French. You guessed it, they serve French cuisine. Correction… awesome French cuisine! They serve a fixed price menu based on the main course you choose, then you can pick an appetizer and a dessert. Monique and I were the meat lovers and both had cuts of beef: filet mignon for me and a black pepper steak for her. Tim and Shana both had the salmon as their main course. The appetizers were great as well… Tim got mussels (and thankfully shared!) and I had spanish ravioli filled with crab meat and drenched in some kinda yummy sauce. We also got a plate of cheeses and I hadn’t heard of any of them before: Etorki, Saint Andre, Morbier, and Saint Agur. I don’t know which was which, but there wasn’t one we didn’t love. Dessert was this huge cart of French pastries that we all got to choose one from. Not a bad choice among them, but my favorite was the raspberry tart that Monique picked. Sounds cliche, but it really took me back to Paris. The whole place did, really. The only thing missing was a slightly less pregnant wife, some coffee, and a big communication barrier.

see all 10 photos in a slideshow

Last night we had a bunch of friends over to play some Halo 3 for our second “Halo Nite” event. The last one was back in 2004 and it was a generation ago for the game as well as the Xbox. This time we had about 20 people show up, 13 of those were players. Add to that two players in Colorado via the magic of the internet. We played from 6pm until 3:30 in the morning! (although we took quite a few breaks for pizza and other socializing) It’s incredibly fun to talk about the map we just played, and Halo 3 has a cool theater feature where you can watch the entire battle you just had, it’s great!

Again for this Halo Nite, I made some “dogtags” for everyone. Here is a sample:

Another thing we stopped playing for was something I’ve been working on for some time. It’s a green screen studio in our garage! I’m still learning, so these photos aren’t all that clear, but it was really fun to mess around with between fights.

view the slideshow!

As was the case last time, Halo Nite was a lot of fun. Thanks to all that came and made it such a great time. It was nice to get the gang together and blow stuff up before our bundle of joy arrives. I’m not sure when the next chance we’ll have for something like this!

Bryan and I were foolish enough to get up at 3am and try to get some photos of the ever so cool sounding meteor shower. Check this out:

Keiss [a comet] “has visited the inner solar system only twice in the past 2,000 years,” says NASA. “In 83 BC, give or take a few centuries, Keiss swung by the sun and laid down a trail of dusty debris that has been drifting toward Earth’s orbit ever since. On Sept. 1, the dusty trail and Earth will meet.”

Wow! Freakin awesome, right? Well, it was pretty cool, we saw a dozen or so meteors, some with massive trails. But we didn’t really get a whole lot in photos. In the center of the photo above you’ll see the best one that I caught. The shot is way too bright, but we were experimenting, so whatever. Anyway… we decided to spend some quality time goofing off with long exposure shots while we were there in the dark. Check some of the other shots we created in a slideshow.

Arlen’s in town and we had him over for dinner on Tuesday night. It’s always good to see him and we were able to visit for a bit. Monique made some grub and we goofed around on the computer making some HDRs from photos that Arlen took earlier that day of this amazing church in LA. We talked a lot and caught up on things throughout the evening. It’s always great to spend time with a friend that you haven’t seen in awhile, but it’s even a better feeling to know that you can just pick up where you left off and feel like it’s been days instead of a year since you last saw them.

The photo of Arlen above was taken a long time ago (probably 10-12 years ago) at a local Kmart, I think. Excuse the fuzziness, it was taken from a video tape, and I just happened to stumble across it tonight (the image cap, not the video)

Which reminds me… I hereby swear to utilize my new Mac Pro to go through some of the old “Friends” footage that I have and put something on in DVD format by Christmas time. Feel free to remind me about this promise as I’ve wanted to make time for this kinda thing before and never seem to get around to it. But with that new system (16x dual-layer DVD burning!!) and media being a lot more affordable now, the excuses are wearing thin.